I agree. On one side we must admit that many national teams grew a lot compared to the past because I remember that growing up results like 6-0, 7-0 or even 8-0 would happen quite often during the qualification phase; nowadays even a match against a smaller team is tough. At the same time the quality of many countries with a lot of history dramatically plummeted: there are no more players like Pirlo, Totti, Zidane, Henry, Ronaldo, Rivaldo, Ronaldinho, Ballack, Lahm, etc. Football is changing, and not in a positive way.
I thought I'm the only one that has observed this recent trend in football history, even recently I had
discussionsome discussions with fellow football enthusiasts and I raised this issue of
the declining rate of world class players we used to have in the past, and that very discussion was specifically on the issue of Champions league, where all the big teams/clubs we used to know as
atof 2015 backwards used to have at least 5 world class players in a particular team, ranging from defenders ,midfielders to classic strikers. BARCELONA for instance, Iniesta, Xavi, Messi, Eto, Puyol etc, in the same team, but today hardly you see this kind of players
in one club, and same
thing when it comes national or country Football, Football seems to reach its highest level in the era of Cristiano Ronaldo and Messi.